In a world of rappers, Celine chose rock

A few days ago, for her continuing series Portrait of a Musician, Celine released a photoshoot with a rather exceptional protagonist: Bob Dylan. The American music legend, a singer-songwriter who was awarded the Pulitzer Prize and also the Nobel Prize for Literature, wasn't photographed since 2012 - and the fact that he decided to have his photo taken by Hedi Slimane himself for a project associated with a fashion brand speaks volumes about the cultural capital Slimane can boast. The Bob Dylan portrait, by the way, is the culmination of a series of similar projects that have had at their center Jack White, Julian Casablancas of The Strokes, Kevin Parker of Tame Impala, and Paul Banks of Interpol in recent months alone. Anyone familiar with Slimane and his work knows that the designer's career has developed not only in fashion but also in music - and specifically in the romantic circles of rock. The portraits Slimane now signs at Celine's represent at bottom the desire to give cohesion to a heritage of personal as well as cultural knowledge that in the French designer's career has been expressed through a shocking number of collaborations with the world of music expressed both through fashion, through the curation of stage costumes for various artists, and through photography with numerous portraits seen over the years. But with Celine this collaboration finds ultimate fulfillment.

If rock has been accompanying Celine since Slimane's debut as creative director (the first SS19 fashion show opened with Runway by La Femme) and all of his shows have music by more or less underground artists as a soundtrack, in the last period the link between the brand and the musical era defined by the same "Age of Indiness" has been tightening more and more. There must surely be something sentimental linking Slimane to that early 2000s indie rock scene that, indeed, he brought to the stage and mythologized at the time of his debut at Dior Homme whose collections, let us remember, were all named after a specific song. It was also the era when Slimane created clothes for The Strokes, The Libertines, Franz Ferninand, and The Killers - an era faithfully preserved in the endless online photo diary that Slimane himself has been updating since remote 2006. It was precisely The Libertines who created the soundtrack for the SS23 digital show for the women's collection and performed live at the last FW23 show for the men's collection at Le Palace in Paris. In December, on the other hand, for the show at the Wiltern Theater in Los Angeles, the collection soon became a concert (quite wild, too, listening to reports from those in attendance) with a line-up that included Iggy Pop, Interpol, The Strokes, and The Killers. Finally, Slimane collaborated on Meet Me in the Bathroom, a film adaptation of Lizzy Goodman's book of the same name about New York's underground music scene in the early 2000s.

In all of these creative activities one glimpses not only the desire to intercept and be an interpreter of a particular and original aspect of the Y2K phenomenon that has swept fashion in recent seasons, but also that of finding a creative backdrop and foundation that goes beyond the mainstream and its superficiality and instead possesses an autonomous and self-contained cultural status, a tradition of authenticity all its own, and a mythology that, just like Slimane's designs, has remained consistent with itself for years: rock. The idea is also to tap into a star system that is perhaps less current but certainly detached from that ecosystem of mega-stars associated with three or four different commercial brands at once and therefore more ephemeral and volatile, tied to the trend of the moment. This has certainly not prevented the brand from conversing with more modern ambassadors, such as Lisa from Blackpink and Park Bo-gum, but also Austin Butler or Jacob Elordi, who are often seen wearing the brand's clothes, which in any case has expanded its media presence considerably-just think of Travis Kelce's cardigan seen on Saturday Night Live last weekend. No less, in forging his relationship with the world of rock and its historic icons, Celine takes on that timeless iconicity, even inscribing itself in its mythology given that, over the course of a career spanning more than two decades, Slimane himself has amassed a remarkable pedigree by signing the costumes of any superstar thinkable over the years: from the relatively niche Primal Scream to the Rolling Stones and Daft Punk-even the cover of Lady Gaga's The Fame Monster was shot by him, just to give a measure of how influential and ubiquitous his portraits of musicians have been in the last decade.